Redmond (ip-192.com): Security experts give Microsoft mixed reviews after the company did shut down the Waledac botnet (ip-192.com reported here). "Microsoft has taken a bold move in addressing this problem and it will be interesting to see how it develops," said Sandra Toms LaPedis, general manager of the RSA Conference, the world's biggest gathering of security professionals.
While Waledac was responsible for sending more than 650 million spam e-mails to hotmail accounts during an 18-day period in December of 2009, others say the botnet did not make a big contribution to global spam levels.
Jose Nazario, a security expert at Arbor Networks, told the Wall Street Journal that the internet addresses Microsoft has brought down could be a small percentage of those used by hackers to control the network.
"Waledac was not a high threat, it's less than 1 percent of the spam traffic," said Richard Cox, chief information officer at Spamhaus. "What we're worried about is Zeus, which is a far more damaging botnet, which is creating a substantial amount of spam."
The software giant claimed its approach had "quickly and effectively cut off traffic to Waledac and severed the connection to most of its thousands of zombie computers".
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